on the surplus of the revenues assigned to the guarantee of the
Anatolian railway collected by the Public Debt Administration,
on the excess revenue, after certain deductions, accruing to the
government under the “Annex-Decree to the Decree of Muharrem”
above described, on the sheep tax of the vilayets of Koniah, Adana
and Aleppo, and on the railway itself. The first series (54,000,000
francs or £2,160,000), was duly handed over to the concessionaires
in 1903, and was floated in Berlin at 86.4% realizing the sum of
£1,868,000. The division of the line into equal sections of 200
kilometres apiece produced at once a somewhat ridiculous result.
The little town of Eregli, some 190 kilometres distant from Konia,
presented the only excusable locality for the terminus of the first
section, and even that place is 90 kilometres distant from Karaman,
the last town of any importance for some hundreds of miles on the
way to the Euphrates valley, the country between the two towns
being desolate and sparsely inhabited. But the Bagdad Railway
Company[1] (the share capital of which is £600,000 half paid up),
naturally anxious to earn the whole of the capitalized subvention,
completed the construction of the entire 200 kilometres. The line
was thus continued to a station taking its name from Bulgurlu,
a small straggling village four miles away, between which and Eregli
there is not a single habitation. But even this did not quite
complete the distance, and the line was carried on for still another
kilometre and there stopped, “with its pair of rails gauntly
projecting from the permanent way” (Fraser, The Short Cut to India,
1909). The outside cost of construction of the first section, which
lies entirely in the plains of Konia, is estimated to have been
£625,000; the company retained, therefore, a profit of at least
1¼ millions sterling on this first part of the enterprise. In the second
section the Taurus range is reached, after which the construction
becomes much more difficult and costly. On the 2nd of June 1908
a fresh convention was signed between the government and the
Bagdad Railway Company providing, on the same financial basis,
for the extension of the line from Bulgurlu to Helif and of the
construction of a branch from Tel-Habesh to Aleppo, covering a total
aggregate length of approximately 840 kilometres. The principle
of equal sections of 200 kilometres was thus set on one side. The
payments to the company were to be made in two lump sums
forming “series 2 and 3” of the “Imperial Ottoman Bagdad
railway loan,” series 2 amounting to £4,320,000, which was delivered
to the company on the signature of the contract, and series 3 to
£4,760,000. The Bagdad railway must for much time be a heavy
weight on the Turkish budget, the country through which it passes—with
the exception of the sections passing from Adana to Osmanieh,
through the Killis-Aleppo-Euphrates district (that is, the first point
at which the line crosses the Euphrates some 600 m. from Bagdad),
and to a lesser extent through the plains of Seruj and Harran—being
very sparsely populated, while the financial system adopted
offers no inducement to the concessionaire company to work for
increasing earnings. It should be mentioned that the Bagdad
Railway Company has sublet the working of the line to the
Anatolian Railway Company at the rate of £148 per kilometre, as
against the £180 per kilometre guaranteed by the Turkish government-
Ottoman Railways worked at end of 1908.
Designation of Main Lines. | Length in Miles (including branch lines). |
Amount Kilometric Guarantees. |
Turkey in Europe:— | £ | |
Oriental Railways[2] | 815 | Nil |
Salonica-Monastir | 137 | 572 |
Salonica-Constantinople | 317 | 620 |
Total European Turkey | 1269 | |
Turkey in Asia:— | ||
Hamidie Railway of the Hejaz[3] | 932 | Nil. |
Anatolian Railway | 635 | Varies from £270 to £600. |
Bagdad Railway | ||
(Konia-Bulgurlu section)[4] | 124 | £620: Annuity £440; Working Expenses £180. |
Mudania-Brusa | 26 | Nil. |
Smyrna-Aidin | 320 | Nil. |
Smyrna-Cassaba | 322 | For main-line and Burnabat and Manisa-Soma branches the government guarantees £92,400 as half the annual receipts. For the Alashehr-Karahissar extension, there is a kilometric guarantee of £755. |
Damascus-Hama | 361 | 520 |
Mersina-Adana[5] | 42 | Nil. |
Jaffa-Jerusalem | 54 | Nil. |
Total Asiatic Turkey | 2816 | |
Grand Total | 4085 |
Results of 1908 according to the Nationality of the Capital.
Nationality of the Capital. |
Companies or Societies. | Lengths Worked. | Gross Receipts for the Year 1908. |
Guarantees paid by the State for the Year 1908. |
Rents paid to the State for the Year 1908. |
Totals per Companies. |
Totals per Nationalities. |
Average receipts per mile per Nationality. | ||||||||||||
per Company. |
per Nationality. | |||||||||||||||||||
Miles. | Miles. | £ | £ | £ | £ | £ | £ | |||||||||||||
Ottoman |
|
932 | 932 | 150,435 | — | — | 150,435 | 150,435 | 161 | |||||||||||
137 |
|
129,854 | — | 243 | 129,611 | |||||||||||||||
124 | 14,578 | 108,155 | — | 122,733 | ||||||||||||||||
42 | 36,400 | — | — | 36,400 | ||||||||||||||||
German | 635 | 841,081 | 885 | |||||||||||||||||
209,105 | 117,030 | |||||||||||||||||||
102,570 | 118,755 | — | 552,337 | |||||||||||||||||
4,877 | — | — | ||||||||||||||||||
English | Aidin Railway | 320 | 320 | 293,104 | — | — | 293,104 | 293,104 | 916 | |||||||||||
Austro-German |
|
815 | 815 | 607,619 | — | 115,679 | 491,940 | 491,940 | 604 | |||||||||||
317 |
|
113,505 | 199,728 | — | 313,233 | |||||||||||||||
322 | 223,643 | 146,980 | — | — | 1,092,957 | 1,037 | ||||||||||||||
French | ||||||||||||||||||||
361 | 269,934 | 94,801 | — | 364,735 | ||||||||||||||||
54 | 44,366 | — | — | 44,366 | ||||||||||||||||
Various | Mudania-Brusa | 26 | 26 | 15,039 | — | — | 15,039 | 15,039 | 579 | |||||||||||
Totals | 4,085 | 4,085 | 2,215,029 | 785,449 | 115,922 | 2,884,556 | 2,884,556 | 697 |
- ↑ Specially formed by the Anatolian railway group for the execution, which the Anatolian Railway Company guarantees under the Bagdad Railway Convention, of the Bagdad railway concession.
- ↑ The line from Mustafa-Pasha to Vakarel now lies in the kingdom of Bulgaria.
- ↑ Constructed and worked by the State.
- ↑ Extension of Anatolian Railway.
- ↑ The Anatolian Railway group (German) has obtained control of this little railway, which was originally British.